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If a few novelists experience an golden period, in which they hit the heights time after time, then U.S. writer John Irving’s ran through a sequence of several long, rewarding novels, from his 1978 hit Garp to 1989’s His Owen Meany Book. Such were rich, humorous, big-hearted novels, linking protagonists he refers to as “outsiders” to cultural themes from women's rights to termination.

After His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been declining outcomes, aside from in page length. His last work, the 2022 release The Last Chairlift, was nine hundred pages of themes Irving had examined better in earlier novels (inability to speak, short stature, transgenderism), with a 200-page screenplay in the heart to pad it out – as if padding were required.

Thus we come to a new Irving with reservation but still a small spark of expectation, which glows hotter when we learn that Queen Esther – a mere 432 pages – “returns to the universe of The Cider House Novel”. That 1985 book is part of Irving’s very best books, set primarily in an children's home in the town of St Cloud’s, managed by Dr Wilbur Larch and his protege Homer Wells.

Queen Esther is a letdown from a novelist who once gave such joy

In His Cider House Novel, Irving wrote about pregnancy termination and acceptance with richness, comedy and an comprehensive compassion. And it was a significant book because it abandoned the topics that were turning into repetitive habits in his works: the sport of wrestling, bears, Austrian capital, prostitution.

The novel opens in the made-up town of the Penacook area in the beginning of the 1900s, where the Winslow couple welcome 14-year-old foundling the title character from the orphanage. We are a several years before the storyline of The Cider House Rules, yet Dr Larch remains identifiable: even then addicted to the drug, respected by his staff, opening every talk with “At St Cloud's...” But his presence in Queen Esther is restricted to these early scenes.

The couple worry about bringing up Esther properly: she’s of Jewish faith, and “how could they help a adolescent girl of Jewish descent understand her place?” To address that, we jump ahead to Esther’s adulthood in the 1920s. She will be involved of the Jewish emigration to the region, where she will join the paramilitary group, the Zionist armed group whose “mission was to protect Jewish towns from opposition” and which would subsequently form the foundation of the IDF.

Such are huge topics to tackle, but having brought in them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s disappointing that Queen Esther is not actually about St Cloud’s and Wilbur Larch, it’s still more upsetting that it’s additionally not about Esther. For causes that must involve plot engineering, Esther becomes a gestational carrier for another of the family's offspring, and bears to a male child, James, in the early forties – and the lion's share of this book is Jimmy’s tale.

And now is where Irving’s fixations come roaring back, both common and specific. Jimmy goes to – where else? – Vienna; there’s mention of avoiding the Vietnam draft through bodily injury (Owen Meany); a pet with a meaningful title (the animal, meet Sorrow from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as grappling, prostitutes, writers and penises (Irving’s recurring).

He is a duller persona than the heroine hinted to be, and the secondary characters, such as students the pair, and Jimmy’s tutor the tutor, are flat also. There are several amusing episodes – Jimmy losing his virginity; a brawl where a handful of thugs get assaulted with a walking aid and a tire pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has not once been a delicate author, but that is not the difficulty. He has repeatedly repeated his arguments, foreshadowed plot developments and allowed them to accumulate in the reader’s mind before bringing them to completion in extended, surprising, entertaining moments. For example, in Irving’s books, body parts tend to go missing: remember the tongue in The Garp Novel, the hand part in Owen Meany. Those absences echo through the plot. In the book, a central person is deprived of an upper extremity – but we only find out thirty pages before the finish.

The protagonist returns in the final part in the story, but just with a last-minute sense of ending the story. We do not do find out the entire account of her time in Palestine and Israel. The book is a failure from a author who once gave such pleasure. That’s the bad news. The good news is that The Cider House Rules – upon rereading in parallel to this novel – still remains excellently, four decades later. So choose it in its place: it’s twice as long as the new novel, but 12 times as good.